JESS JUST READS

A BOOK REVIEW BLOG

World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War by Max Brooks

World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War
Max Brooks
September 2006
Adult Fiction

Max Brooks’ World War Z is an oral history of a fictional zombie war. It’s presented as an after-the-event account of what led up to and what eventually over the zombie war. World War Z is the compilation of conversations with survivors of the ordeal, and their recollections and experiences in the war. World War Z is narrated by an agent of the United Nations Postwar Commission, and it makes for a unique book and an interesting stylistic technique. It’s hard to think of any other novel that presents a zombie war in quite the same way.

It goes by many names: “The Crisis,” “The Dark Years,” “The Walking Plague,” as well as newer and more ‘hip’ titles such as “World War Z” or “Z War One”. I personally dislike this last moniker as it implies an inevitable “Z War Two”.

The zombie war that’s being investigated in the novel came very close to eradicating humanity. The novel features interviews with people all around the world, from decimated cities that once teemed with upwards of thirty millions souls to the most remote and inhospitable areas of the planet. These interviews are more like testimonies, with men, women and children who witnessed the zombie war and managed to survive it. Some of their accounts describe the resulting social, political, religious and environmental changes to the world as a result of the zombie war.

“The night it happened, I was walking home from the bus stop. It was around 5am and I’d just finished my shift waiting tables…maybe it was simply being so knackered, but I felt my body instinctively react before I consciously heard the shots.”

Max Brooks manages to piece together how it all started in New Dachang in China and how it then ravaged the planet to near-extinction. World War Z documents the full scope of the zombie war, from beginning to end.

“Ignorance was the enemy. Lies and superstition, misinformation, disinformation. Sometimes, no information at all. Ignorance killed billions of people. Ignorance caused the Zombie War.”

World War Z is a bit of a social commentary on the world. It is a platform to criticise government incompetence, corruption and inability to act quick enough to solve a problem. Despite the lethargy that the reader feels towards the end of the novel because of too many interviews and no apparent end in sight, I did feel like I learnt a lot from World War Z. Battle tactics, medical practices and geographical information are woven throughout the ‘interviews’ featured in the book, adding to the story but also making the reader feel like they’re learning something. Max Brooks has also featured characters with sarcasm and wit, making for an entertaining read.

World War Z explores survival, death, fear and uncertainty. It definitely felt like a niche novel. If you love zombie movies and survival tales, then you’ll love this book. I did find it slow at times and I did find my attention lagging, but stylistically it is a well-written, entertaining novel.

Pointe by Brandy Colbert

Pointe
Brandy Colbert
April 2014
Penguin Random House

Pointe is a debut young adult novel told from the point of view of 17-year-old Theo Cartwright, whose best friend Donovan was kidnapped four years earlier and has just returned home.

Theo is a ballet dancer and is recovering from an eating disorder. Her best friend, Donovan, went missing four years earlier. Or perhaps he ran away. Theo isn’t sure. On a separate note, four years earlier, Theo was dating an older guy Chris until he disappeared and left her just shortly before Donovan’s disappearance. She thought the events weren’t connected, until Donovan returns from being held captive and it becomes clear that Chris was the person responsible.

Brandy has written this book with emotive language, evocative imagery and realistic dialogue. The characters make revelations that give the reader chills, and the disturbing connection between Theo’s relationship four years earlier and Donovan’s kidnapping make for a troubling tale. And Brandy writes it with such beautiful prose that makes it a one-sitting read and something that stays with you long after you’ve put down the book.

Brandy left more unsaid than said – when Donovan returns home after four years, you’d expect him to play a large role in the rest of the novel. But he doesn’t. He won’t speak to anyone, including Theo. She’s been worrying about him for four years and now that he’s back, she’s scared to think of what her ex-boyfriend did to him the four years he was gone.

Set in Chicago, this novel isn’t about finding out the details of what happened to Donovan when he was gone – it’s about Theo finding the courage to tell the police what she knows about his kidnapper. Through flashbacks and reminiscent paragraphs, we learn about Theo’s relationship with her ex-boyfriend. At times he was loving, and at times he hurt her, but she just didn’t realise it because she was so young and she thought she was in love.

Thank you Brandy for writing a young adult novel with a black protagonist, because it doesn’t happen very often. Theo is a fantastic main character. She might seem naive at times, but she’s strong and she’s reflective and she’s dedicated – not only to ballet but to Donovan and her other friends.

Pointe explores many different themes, including mental illness, courage, friendship and relationships. Theo’s mental illness manifested itself into an eating disorder shortly after Chris left her, and the stress of Donovan’s disappearance did nothing to help that. When she learns that Chris was responsible for kidnapping Donovan, and that after disappearing from Theo’s life, Chris waited two weeks in hiding before actually kidnapping Donovan, she retreats back into her old self and her mental state starts to suffer. Ballet is not the most important thing to her anymore, and she starts to make poor choices.

I loved that Brandy did something different with this storyline. Readers would expect the kidnapping to be the main focus of the book, and even though it is, the fact that Donovan doesn’t really play an active role in the book throws the reader off. Donovan appears mostly through Theo’s memories, and that certainly wasn’t something I expected.

I can’t rave about this book enough. It may be categorised as a young adult novel, but adults and older readers will love this. The writing is complex and the characters are diverse and three-dimensional. The issues explored in this novel are in no way immature or reflective of typical ‘high school issues’ that you sometimes see in young adult fiction. This is definitely a fictional novel that anyone over the age of twelve will love.

Small Great Things by Jodi Picoult

Small Great Things
Jodi Picoult
October 2016
Allen & Unwin

Small Great Things is the latest page-turner from Jodi Picoult and explores racism in the United States. Ruth Jefferson is a labour and delivery nurse at a Connecticut hospital with more than twenty years’ experience. During her shift, Ruth begins a routine checkup on a newborn, only to be told a few minutes later that she’s been reassigned to another patient. The parents are white supremacists and don’t want Ruth, who is African-American, to touch their child. The hospital complies with their request, but the next day, the baby goes into cardiac distress while Ruth is alone in the nursery. Ruth hesitates before performing CPR, the baby dies, and then Ruth is charged with negligent homicide.

Jodi Picoult has written another courtroom drama with a heart-wrenching plot. She tackles racism, prejudice and justice with incredible prose and it really feels timely that this book was published around the time of the 2016 Presidential Election.

The book explores racial prejudice through three perspectives: Ruth, the black nurse charged with the murder of the baby; Kennedy McQuarrie, Ruth’s white public defender who doesn’t consider herself to be racist but does unknowingly harbour racial biases; and Turk, the white supremacist whose son Davis died unexpectedly.

Small Great Things is told from these three different points of view and together, they all offer different angles on the events. Jodi has crafted this novel with depth and insight and an incredible amount of research. The book is rich with relationships, family and societal relations.

At no point was I bored when reading Small Great Things. Jodi’s books are always lengthy, but I always read them at incredible speed, desperate to get to the end and find out how the story will conclude. Jodi really has perfected her formula. She always alternates between point of view in order to give different opinions on whichever matter she is exploring (in this case, racism), and morality and tough choices usually play a significant part in the novels she writes. Additionally, her novels always have a suspenseful plot, three-dimensional characters and a brisk rhythm.

Kennedy – over the course of the novel – must come to terms with her white privilege. She realises, for the first time, that she does have racial biases and she acknowledges the pervasiveness of American racism. Turk, who is a loving father and husband but horrendously racist, forms one of the strongest elements of the book. Jodi has captured his beliefs and attitudes so well and he really jumps off the page. You don’t hate him as much as you hate his wife, who is the true racist of the book, but he is loathsome. And yet, Jodi has illustrated him in a way that we at times sympathise for him. He has lost his son and he is losing his wife. With flashbacks and reminiscient paragraphs, we learn his past – how he met and fell in love with Brit and the path that brought him to hate.

“I was writing to my own community…who can very easily point to a neo-Nazi skinhead and say he’s a racist… but who can’t recognise racism in themselves.”
-Jodi Picoult in her author’s note

In the author note at the end of book, Jodi acknowledges that she’s always wanted to write a book about racism in America but never felt like it was her story to tell. She did a lot of research prior to starting this novel, talking to a range of people including women of colour and skinheads. Jodi has taken her research and created yet another amazing novel – it may even be her best novel to date.

At the Edge of the Orchard by Tracy Chevalier

At the Edge of the Orchard
Tracy Chevalier
March 2016
HarperCollins Publishers
Adult Fiction

At the Edge of the Orchard is a 2016 literary fiction novel by Tracy Chevalier, the author of Girl with a Pearl Earring.

This novel is dark, powerful and moving, and alternates setting between Ohio in 1838 and 1853 California. In 1838, James and Sadie Goodenough have settled into the Black Swamp, planting apple trees to claim the land as their own. Life is harsh in the swamp, and as fever picks off their children, husband and wife take solace in separate comforts. James patiently grows his sweet-tasting ‘eaters’ while Sadie gets drunk on applejack made fresh from ‘spitters’, an alcoholic refuge from brutal frontier life. Their fighting takes its toll on all of the Goodenoughs.

In 1853, James and Sadie’s youngest son, Robert, is drifting through Gold Rush California and haunted by the broken family he fled from years earlier. Memories flood the book and slowly, the reader finds out how the 1838 storyline progressed and the effect it had on Robert, who was quite young at the time.

“Robert had tried to lead an honest life, even when surrounded by dishonest people, but no matter how cleanly he lived now, he had made one mistake that he could never escape.”

This book reads like a riveting television drama, filled with fierce characters and troubling financial troubles and the sense that disaster is about the strike. Ohio’s Black Swamp is inhospitable to humans, animals, crops and trees alike, and the Goodenough family have been struggling for years to grow enough apple trees to claim their land and remain financially stable.

At the Edge of the Orchard explores poverty, illness and family hostility. James and Sadie are an unlikely couple who don’t seem to share common interests, respect or compassion. They’re brutal to each other, both mentally and physically, and it takes its toll on their eldest son Robert. The novel alternates between narrative perspectives to give the reader an encompassing sense of the storyline – we get all the facts so that even though Robert may not understand all of the history, the reader does.

We are subjected to alternating narrative perspectives for the course of two decades, which allows us to fill in the details bit by bit until we understand why Robert left his family behind and went running westwards. He finds employment with an English seed agent named William Lobb, but it’s clear throughout the novel that he’s a passive character. He is not active with his choices, and things happen to him not from his own actions but from the actions of those around him. He falls in and out of jobs and relationships quite easily and he doesn’t seem to have strong emotions to suggest he opposes any of the changes in his life.

At the Edge of the Orchard is a slow-moving literary novel that I’d recommend to readers who love a character-driven novel. It’s a slow-burner, and information is revealed intermittently and quite subtly. This book explores what happens when humans interfere with nature; it also delves into family and relationships, and although the first third of the novel drags a little and doesn’t seem to hit the mark, the rest of the novel is quite entertaining and is worth the finish.

Harmless Like You by Rowan Hisayo Buchanan

Harmless Like You
Rowan Hisayo Buchanan
September 2016
Hachette Publishers
Literary Fiction

Harmless Like You is a dual POV literary fiction novel by Rowan Hisayo Buchanan. We’re introduced to Japanese-American Yuki in 1968 when she is 16 years old and has not one friend in New York City. Her parents have moved back to Tokyo and she decides to stay and live with her friend, aspiring model Odile. The book alternates to the year 2016, where gallery owner Jay – whose father has recently died – is accepting his role as a new father. He believes that he is a happily married man, but it’s the year that he will finally confront his mother Yuki, who abandoned their family when he was two years old.

Rowan Hisayo Buchanan explores the blurred boundary between love and pain, selfishness and sacrifice. This novel highlights that the meaning of ‘home’ is complicated and that by starving for a sense of connection, our main character Yuki has actually detached herself from her roots. She’s strayed so far from what she envisioned herself being, that the sacrifices she made almost seem to have been made without real intention to do so. Yuki does not seem to be in control of herself, and she does not seem able to climb out of the painful hole that she finds herself in when she enters an abusive relationship. She is also a deeply lonely character who strives for artistic fulfilment.

“He deposited the bag on the table. Silently, he bent, picking up pages, stacking them, smoothing the edges of the manuscript. He came right to her, still silent, and eased the last sheet from between her fingers, tapped the pile three times, and dropped it back in the drawer. The drawer clattered as he punched it shut. He crouched, eyes level with Yuki’s. He hit her – not hard, but she was unprepared. She fell, landing on the point of her elbow. Her limbs went loose. She slid across the floor. His nail had caught her lip and she tasted blood. Out the window, she saw aeroplane trails. And she didn’t move. She lay and watched them decay.”

Harmless Like You explores the notion that children can inherit identity from their parents. Pain travels through the generations in this novel. Jay, having been abandoned by his mother when he was two years old, is finding fatherhood travelling and his marriage even more so. He loves his wife, but he is not attentive or present, much like his mother Yuki.

“I think the real cowards are the ones over there killing harmless little girls like you”

This novel is unflinchingly honest and captures some of the ugliest aspects of life that a person can experience. Harmless Like You highlights the messier side of life – both Yuki and Jay struggle with fidelity, and at one point, Jay wonders if he loves his child at all. He wonders what it would be like if he just dropped her.

Both characters are looking for fulfilment in life, and this resulted in Yuki abandoning her child. It seems like Jay is thinking the same thing. By delving into Yuki’s past, we come to understand her as a character and the need she has for artistic fulfilment, and how that trumps her being a parent to Jay. The separate stories from her life allow the reader to see why she left her husband and son and why she never came back.

Harmless Like You is an elegant and moving novel that explores the difficulty of life, love and family. It’s extremely well-written and beautifully eloquent and Rowan leaves more unsaid that said. The reader comes to understand the complicated relationships between parents and children, and how actions can cause unintended consequences.